January 5, 2007

Another Myth Shattered

As it turns out, Eskimos don't have more words for "snow" that English speakers:

The idea that Eskimos have many more words for snow than English speakers is a myth. All eight Eskimo languages have extraordinarily rich possibilities for deriving new words on the fly from established bases. So where English uses separate words to make up descriptive phrases like "early snow falling in autumn" or "snow with a herring-scale pattern etched into it by rainfall", Eskimo languages have an astonishing propensity for being able to express such concepts (about anything, not just snow) with a single derived word. To the extent that counting basic snow words makes any real sense (it is often difficult to decide whether a word really names a snow phenomenon), Eskimo languages do not appear to have more than English has (think of snow, slush, sleet, blizzard, drift, white-out, flurry, powder, dusting, and so on).

I'm reminded of a Rex F. May (a.k.a. "Baloo") cartoon I saw years (decades?) ago in Reason magazine. Two Eskimos are heaving blocks of ice to build an igloo when one turns to the other and says "Did you know that people down south have 48 different words for building material?"

About D-Ed Reckoning

The primary problem with K-12 education today is the problem of dead reckoning--an estimate based on little or no information. We don't know what a good K-12 education system is because we've never seen one operating. A good education system is one that is capable of educating almost every child.